Moderately obsessed with The Big Bang Theory? It’s okay to admit it! And once you’ve admitted your love, check out “Unraveling the Mysteries of The Big Bang Theory: An Unabashedly Unauthorized Companion” brought to us by George Beahm. For fanatics,this intense guidebook to the scientific world of Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, Penny, Raj, Amy, and Bernadette will keep you entertained for hours. Oh, if only universities offered classes on this show – this would indeed be the textbook they’d use.

I must admit that this is one of the Smart Pop books I didn’t enjoy as much as I’ve enjoyed some others like Triumph of The Walking Dead. Most of the information provided in chapters is stuff I assume most other fans already know about (re: Kaley Cuoco’s biography, trivia on the unaired pilot.) Here, it has been reformatted and repackaged.

The real gems of this book lay towards the back of the book.

Part 6, “The Episode Title Explication” goes through four seasons of episode titles and explains their meaning. I do think this might have been handled better (with the scientific explanation mentioned more thoroughly), but it’s still an interesting read.

Part 7, “Shedding Light on Dark Matter” is a glossary of pop culture the show uses and let’s you know exactly why our favorite nerds hate Ben Affleck so much. I enjoy that items are not just defined in general, but specifically as they were referred to on the show.

It’s unfortunate that less than a third of the book was really interesting for me. But at least those two sections are very entertaining. I would encourage authors to rely on the fact that fans who will buy these sorts of books already have plenty of basic knowledge, and there’s no need to fill up a book with it unless you’re appealing to a dumbed-down, broader fanbase that doesn’t know what Comic Con is. (If they don’t know by now…let it be.)